Readers' comments

Can't understand why doesn't the article mention Estonia - the country with one of the highest taxes in the world with 21% income tax and 33% social security tax applied to all individual income (except the first 1728 euros a year which is not taxed by income tax but is still taxed by social security tax).

Maryland Woman Has Kept Track of Every Tax on Her In 2012 — and You’re Not Going to Believe How Much She’s Paid So Far

Does Maryland resident Alice Scanlon pay more taxes than you? Maybe not. But Scanlon certainly keeps track of her taxes better than you. Much better. Down to the penny better.

“I was listening to our president about a year ago and I kept hearing him say ‘pay your fair share,” Scanlon told TheBlaze recently. “It got me thinking, what is our fair share?” So she turned to her records, and an excel spreadsheet.

It would be interesting to correlate economic growth with tax rates. I suspect an inverse correlation. Further, US corporate tax rates are the highest in the world, and in fast growth economies they are lower. It would also be interesting to see how we compare on long term capital gains taxes. Finally, income taxes only tell a part of the tax story. What about property and sales taxes, and VAT? It would be good to see some longitudinal correlation studies to see if Friedman or Keynes economic theories work better in practice.

I do not trust these data. E.g. for Sweden, social security of 31.42% on top of $100.000 is not included. Federal and local taxes are included however. Total will be 67%. I expect other countries data to also suffer from errors rendering the chart useless.

"Social security" - you mean the taxation on the company not on your gross income? I know for my income in Sweden that taxation on my gross income is made up of income tax and municipal tax. The social security portion bourn by the employer is a hidden taxation that is not deducted from my gross salary, but instead is paid by my employer. It's not the same thing as a direct deduction from your salary.

I'm curious how was the countries selected for the chart? There's France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the US but neither the UK nor the Netherlands . Are the UK and the Netherlands unimportant? OR the taxes are average comparing to others?
If KMPG compares countries with the highest income tax rates the country with 52% (Netherlands) should be included also.

The figure for Swiss taxes is almost certainly wrong and far too low. I suspect they only took federal taxes into consideration which are actually much less than cantonal and municipal income tax. Total tax load must be rather similar to Britain I believe.

No, the burden of the payroll tax is shared between employers and employees, regardless of who actually remits the tax to the government. The burdens are determined by the relevant elasticities, among other things.

A recent OECD study showed that there is an inverse relationship between taxes imposed on high income earners and the fraction of taxes they contribute. High tax rate countries such as Norway and Sweden, high income earners pay a much lower fraction of the total ta burden than does the leader in redistribution of the tax burden - the US. European countries have responded by lowering tax rates on the rich and shifting a larger fraction of the total burden to VAT.

Marginal tax rate and the effective tax rate are equal only under flat tax, so yes, most everyone understands that marginal and effective rate is not the same for most of these countries at earnings of $100k per year.

The above chart is a chart of average tax rates for a wage income of $100k. Simple as that. Should have been more clearly stated above the chart.

('Effective' really shouldn't be used here, since it's normally used in the context of 'effective marginal tax rates' which incorporate the pace of benefit withdrawal plus tax payment with rising income).